Wheeling back she moved to open the fridge in hopes of finding a bottled water to give to Danny. Usually, she would have called to Theo for help, but she knew he and his friend were exchanging terse words and didn’t want to interrupt for something she could manage herself.
The bottled water in the fridge was on the top shelf. Margo sighed as she looked up at the water sparkling in the light as if taunting her.
Danny watched Margo’s frustration at the bottled water too far out of her reach and huffed determinedly. He walked to a kitchen barstool and grabbed the long legs with his two small hands. He pushed with all his might so it scraped softly against the hardwood kitchen floor on its way to the fridge.
“Danny, I don’t think that’s a good idea. You’re not big enough to climb that and even if you were, it wouldn’t be safe.” Truth be told, half Margo’s attention was on trying to hear what the men were saying in the next room. She thought she overheard her name several times then Greg’s voice definitely said the words “fragile” and “damaged.”
That was all Margo needed to hear. Anger replaced heartbreak in the former Special Forces soldier. She looked at the barstool beside her and gritted her teeth. “Stand back Danny. I’m going to get you that water.”
She grabbed the barstool’s seat and pulled herself up. She’d been working on her physical therapy, so the muscles in her arms and shoulders were strong enough to get her there. With her belly leaning heavily against the seat, she reached one hand up toward the water bottle and seeing how far from her goal she was, she began pulling on the shelf to gain more height. Her eyes never left the bottle of water, even as it began to lightly slosh.
Then it occurred to her that she could maybe jostle a bottle so it would fall. That was the last thought she had before the barstool slipped out from under her unsteady frame and her fragile, damaged body hit the floor. Three bottles of cold water smashed to the unforgiving ground around her, bursting open at the seams.
Danny’s simultaneous wail of fear and surprise reverberated off the stark white walls of the bachelor’s kitchen.
When Theo and Greg burst into the room at full sprint, they saw Margo face down on the floor, bottles of water still gushing at their popped seams. Danny was crouched beside Margo’s ashen face. His little hands were shaking her shoulders trying to wake her but that’s not what made Theo’s jaw drop. He rushed to Margo’s side as the voice of the usually silent little boy screamed one word over and over again. Danny was calling for her, begging in a plaintive, terrified voice, “Mama! Mama! Maaama!”
No one heard Margo’s phone ringing in the other room over the deafening roar of fear that echoed painfully in the first words of an orphaned three-year-old who’d thought he’d found a mother to love him.
Chapter 10 Rest Stop
Evan disconnected the call when he heard his mother’s voicemail pick up, again. “Where is she?”
“We’ll just try again in a while,” Alik reassured. He was hoping there was a good reason why their mom wasn’t picking up the phone.
“There’s a rest stop two miles up.” Farrow’s voice broke the awkward silence that had saturated the first two hours of their drive away from Arkdone and Williams.
“Are you saying you need to make a stop?” Alik asked.
“Well, yeah, I do.”
“Me, too,” Sloan’s little-girl voice piped up from the middle row of seats.
“I’d like to clean up a little,” Meg spoke up from the very back of the SUV in a voice that sounded completely alert, though she looked to have been sleeping the entire drive.
“I guess we’re stopping,” Alik nodded slowly, a frown pressed into his brow as he worried about who might be tracking them.
“I could use some munchies,” Evan mused. “Tell me we have quarters or dollar bills for the vending machine.”
“I only have a fifty and credit cards,” Alik offered.
Farrow was shuffling through the glove box in search of coins, but coming up dry. “I only found six quarters, a nickel, two dimes and a bunch of pennies stuck together with spilled soda. Yuck.”
“That’ll buy just enough food to make me mad,” Cole grumbled.
“Well, I could jury-rig the machines and we could leave the fifty inside,” Evan offered casually.
Cole sat upright and looked over at the thirteen-year-old with puppy-dog eyes. “I love you, man.”
Evan rolled his eyes. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Don’t you ever say that again, little brother!” Cole was nodding dramatically. “This is a special moment between us. My stomach is about to eat itself, I’m so hungry. Your act of not-quite thievery is pure goodness, dude!”
“Maybe they’ll be the kind of machines that take credit cards,” Alik mumbled.
“Let’s hope so,” Farrow shook her head at the boys.